Céline Pelcé - a practice of impermanence

Photo by Daisuke Takashige, courtesy of the artist

In a recent Foundations Seminar, the artist Céline Pelcé joined us to discuss her practice, and explain her innovative way of working with food. Céline’s approach to food is a practice in impermanence. Having originally trained as an architect, then worked in interior design, Céline realised that the immutability of the spaces she created weren’t as interesting to her as the ephemerality of what took place within them. Working in a medium that leaves behind a non-material element means Céline’s work transcends the physical and instead focuses on the intangible. 

In this, memory plays a crucial role for it is, despite its permanence, utterly intangible. A meal’s legacy is in its memory; it lives on in the minds of those who experience it. This legacy is not only mental but also physical; a memory nutritionally writ on the body of the person who consumed it. In this way, Céline understands food to connect us to the world in which we live. As a medium, food becomes a conduit that tells a tale through its consumption. The body, as a receptor and generator, reconstitutes this edible knowledge, ingesting its stories. With the body as our tool, we can experience food from both macro and micro perspectives: from its sensory consumption; to its bodily absorption.

Similarly, the ingredients that make a meal bear the memory of the ground from whence they came. This connection to place is a recurring theme throughout Céline’s practice, and one which finds parities in her focus on the spaces in which food is consumed. It is in this that her spatial training in architecture and interiors come to the fore. Through her experience of creating tangible spaces by the materials that bound them, her practice in food can do the inverse by creating intangible places defined by what happens therein.

Céline’s approach to food thus explores narratives that go beyond the physical and temporal bounds of a meal, and instead explore the actions that surround eating. This manifests itself in Céline’s unique methods of serving food, which encourage the eater to approach the dish in unconventional ways. From licking twigs to smelling surfaces, the eater gets to experience food in ways that might make them question their relationship to it.

Photo by Daisuke Takashige, courtesy of the artist

In 2021, Céline took part in an artists residency at Villa Kujoyama, in Kyoto, Japan. Villa Kujoyama, located on the wooded outskirts of the city, is a space run by the Institut Français to encourage Franco-Japanese cultural collaboration. During her residency, Céline’s interests took two principle focusses: the taste of Umami; and her surrounding landscapes. In the taste of Umami, she saw a link between time and space through fermentation. In her surroundings, the relationship between the natural and manmade encouraged her to focus on the liminal space where the two met. In Japan, these spaces are known as satoyama (里山), and are considered to provide numerous ecological and agricultural benefits to the surrounding landscapes. 

Her interests initially manifested in a series of exploratory walks that she conducted together with local herbalist Misa Murata. One focussed on the tension between introduced and native species in the woodlands by serving ‘Paradoxical Recipes;’ another examined the ecological and agricultural relationship between mountain and sea, and their mythological entanglement recorded in ancient Shinto texts. 

These walks were succeeded by a collaborative project with lacquer artist and fellow resident, Flore Falcinelli. From an exploration of their surroundings, Flore and Céline began exploring the meteorological, geographical, and temporal elements that create what they called a ‘poetry of place.’ This poetry of place was defined by the expansive ecological relationships that made up the environments they were studying, and encouraged them to prepare a meal that served dishes from nonhuman perspectives. 

Photo by Daisuke Takashige, courtesy of the artist

Her time in Japan only concretised the importance of impermanence in her practice. She has since begun exploring how to build a space without structure, solely through objects, movements, gestures, or ingredients. Her practice now questions how to use these mediums to reveal the immateriality that lies in between them. This is manifested in her studies of the Japanese Tea Ceremony, which have taught her that, through the form, one can reach the formless.

Céline’s practice posits food as a conduit; a channel between the material and the immaterial; the tangible and the intangible. From her exploration of the liminal spaces that border the human and the natural world; to the rituals enacted by both humans and nonhumans: she reveals the connections of which we might not otherwise be cognisant between the disparate agents that form ecological networks. She closes her talk with a statement that suggests her practice in impermanence resounds for her in more ways than one: “the more I work with food, the less material I get.”

Photo by Daisuke Takashige, courtesy of the artist